How do you spell heaven? For me, it is R-a-v-e-l-l-o, a sun-splashed hill town along the Amalfi Coast. Hoyt and I spent a few days there in 2003. This post was going to be Italy, Part II (with Sienna, Florence, and Pompeii) but HELP, I’m stuck in Ravello, and I can’t get out!
Ravello, in the province of Salerno, Campania southern Italy, is so stunning that it became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1996. With only about 2,500 inhabitants, it is easy to feel far away from the more bustling cities like Rome. Hoyt drove us north up the Amalfi Coast from Pompeii so I would be on the side against the hills, not hanging over the cliff scared to death! What a guy!
The hills were alive with music and lemons
One evening, we attended a concert in a lovely grotto down the hill from our hotel. Musicians and singers gathered under the ancient limestone alcove, and serenaded us until after dark. Another evening it drizzled, and afterwards we had a rainbow sighting from our balcony.
It’s been a dozen years since our trip, but Hotel Amore, where we had a “room with a view,” may still be there. It was cozy and quiet. Our room had a little balcony that hovered over the sea, and the scent of lemons from trees growing along nearby pathways filled the air.
Good grief, Hoyt, could it have been any more romantic? Nope.
One afternoon we visited a nearby palace garden. Can’t you picture a motion picture filmed on its grounds? There probably was …
So, enjoy these photos—they really do tell our Ravello story. Other Italy stories to come later …
See you next time!
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Click on any photo and a slideshow ensues…
Mary Ann
I want to go!
If you ever get the chance, check out “Beat the Devil,” a Humphrey Bogart film directed by John Huston, screenplay by Truman Capote & Huston. It’s a parody of the Maltese Falcon, but I think it was just an excuse for Huston to gather together a bunch of friends to have fun in Ravello where it was filmed. (Your photo of the terrace with the stone busts reminded me of the movie. At least one scene is filmed there.) You can find the film here, but the video is not good quality. http://www.openculture.com/2014/02/beat-the-devil.html
Charlene L. Edge
Yay! Thanks for the tip, Mary Ann. I will definitely watch that film!
Rob Ruff
Lovely post, Charlene. Thanks!
Charlene L. Edge
I meant to add that the wine we had in Ravello was bravissimo!
Linda Goddard
So lovely, Charlene! Thank you for sharing this amazing trip!
Charlene L. Edge
It was amazing. Sometimes it seems like a dream…
John Arnett
Looking at Google’s map and especially the satellite view, Hotel Amore is just a few hundred yards from Villa Cimbrone visited by many other [than yourselves] dignitaries. Beautiful photos.
from Wikipedia: “Many famous visitors came to the villa [Cimbrone] during the Beckett family’s ownership. It was a favourite haunt of the Bloomsbury Group, including Virginia Woolf, Leonard Woolf, E. M. Forster, John Maynard Keynes, and Lytton Strachey. Other visitors included D. H. Lawrence, Vita Sackville-West, Edward James, Diana Mosley, Henry Moore, T. S. Eliot, Jean Piaget, Winston Churchill and the Duke and Duchess of Kent. The actress Greta Garbo and her then-lover, the conductor Leopold Stokowski, stayed at the villa several times in the late 1930s; a visit of 1938 is memorialized on a plaque.”
Charlene L. Edge
Wow! Thank you, John.